: The intense, angst-filled and often perplexing images of Edvard
Munch, the troubled and enigmatic Norwegian painter and
printmaker, have long fascinated Americans. Best-known for his
Symbolist masterpiece, "The Scream," an icon of world art that
many feel epitomizes Twentieth Century anxiety and tension, he
produced a large body of other work that deserves greater
recognition and understanding.
"Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul," the first American
retrospective devoted to his art in nearly 30 years, features 87
paintings and 50 works on paper that document the wide range of
memorable images in Munch's oeuvre.
Organized by Kynaston McShine, chief curator at the Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA), the exhibition will be on view at that museum
through May 8. A scholarly catalog accompanies the show. In it,
McShine concludes that Munch's paintings and graphic work "assure
him an essential and even fundamental place in the canon of
modern art."
Interesting and rewarding print exhibitions that underscore
Munch's mastery of etching, lithography and woodcut are on view
at New York's Scandinavia House (through May 13) and Stanford
University's Cantor Arts Center (through June 25), complementing
the MoMA blockbuster.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall mounted an exhibition of
25 works relating to the museum's recently acquired "Mermaid," a
large oil based on Nordic mythology depicting a sensuous maiden
emerging from the sea. It is on loan to the current exhibition.
In the last of many self-portrayals, Munch painted himself in
"Self-Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed," 1940-42, as a
slim but resolute figure standing between his brightly hued
studio and his colorful bedroom - and between the clock and
bed, symbols of death. Munch Museum, Oslo.
The MoMA show documents personal traumas that shaped Munch's
art, and his struggles to translate his experiences into universal
terms that would be comprehensible to wide audiences.
Much emphasis is placed on the fact that Munch's primary source
of inspiration was his own life, which was marked by personal and
family illnesses, deaths of close relatives, emotional
instability and heartbreak and worse resulting from complicated
relationships with women. As McShine puts it, "The narrative of
Munch's life and work, rooted in the Nineteenth Century, somehow
transforms, through his own will and force, his personal
experiences into an extraordinary examination of what he terms
'the modern life of the soul' - birth, innocence, love, sexual
passion, melancholy, anger, jealousy, despair, anxiety, illness
and death."
The son of an army doctor, Munch (1863-1944) grew up in
Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, in a home overshadowed by the
death of his mother when he was 5 and of a beloved sister when he
was 14, both of tuberculosis. "Illness, insanity and death were
the black angels that hovered over my cradle," Munch recalled. He
was convinced that he would eventually go insane. Nevertheless,
by his late teens he had decided to become an artist.
His father, a devoutly religious man, had a complicated
relationship with Edvard. Following Dr Munch's death in 1889, his
son painted the haunting "Night in Saint-Cloud," 1890, which
shows a lonely man seated by a window in a hazy blue room that is
actually one Munch occupied in Paris. It is three portraits
simultaneously - the artist's father as he recalled him resting
in a chair at home, a friend who posed for the painting and Munch
himself, grieving for his deceased parent.
Some of Munch's most wrenching images, such as "The Sick Child,"
evoke traumatic childhood memories. Painted in two versions, in
1886 and 1896, this unusual composition focuses on the profile of
his dying sister, Sophie, while blurring the other figure
(modeled by his aunt) and the background. As Munch's biographer,
Sue Prideaux, writes, "Nothing like 'The Sick Child' had been
seen before, either inside or outside Norway." Although roundly
criticized, Munch regarded it as the foundation for his future
art.
